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We are just two short weeks away from the beginning of Founders’ Week and the excitement is tangible! It gives us great pleasure to present the week’s program. Our guests of honour will be doing a series of talks, discussions and workshops with an aim to bolster the entrepreneurial spirit we’ve seen growing in our region and hopefully spark a lot of discussion and action!

For the full program visit http://foundersweek.fi/program, but here are some highlights:

Monday, June 4th “Welcome to Founders’ Week”, 10 am @ Aalto Venture Garage.

We’ll be kicking the week off at the Garage, with a welcoming speech from Mr. Alexander Stubb, Finland’s Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade. The morning continues with a Q&A with our four stars of the week – Russel Simmons, Sami Inkinen, Paul Bragiel and Aaron Patzer. Themes of the day focus on the importance of entrepreneurship, startup culture and appreciating entrepreneurs as the drivers of innovation, growth and welfare.

Sign up here!

Wednesday, June 6th “Founder Stories – visions and ventures”, 4pm @ Aalto School of Economics.

On Wednesday we will be privy to “stories of the start” via a keynote from Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer, followed by a panel and Q&A with our entire cast of allstars. The evening will be focused on early stage stories of starting up – the difficulties, the sweat – and on nurturing a culture that supports entrepreneurship.

Sign up here!

Thursday, June 7th, “Startup Sauna Demo Day”, 6pm @ Tapahtumakeskus Telakka.

Startup Sauna Demo Day will showcase the leanest (pun intended) and meanest startups from the program’s Spring Batch 2012. The rockstar teams pitching will be joined on stage by Russel, Aaron and Paul, who will relay their own experiences in all things startup. Join us for an evening of celebrating entrepreneurship and startups!

Sign up here!

More events and information at http://foundersweek.fi

In addition to these, the guys will be sparring local startups and taking in the summer in Helsinki.

Also join the week at http://www.facebook.com/events/292137444213121/ and follow us on twitter @aaltoes & #foundersweek.

If you’re interested in helping out, contact nippe (a) aaltoes.com. We can always use an extra hand ; )

We are really excited about the next Aaltoes Pitch it., on April 26, at the Aalto Venture Garage. Again, we have a great line-up of teams and noteworthy jury aboard. The night will be a great  great opportunity to get feedback, find funding for your startup and get it on the map. Check out our jury:

Elina Lepomäki, Libera

Elina Lepomäki works as an angel investor and a startup advisor. She is Chairman of the Board at Transfluent, a startup that has excelled in several international startup competitions in the autumn of 2011. Previously, Lepomäki has worked in investment banking for eight years. Her latest position was as Director of Global Banking&Markets at RBS.

Antti Ylimutka, Startup Sauna

Antti is wingman at Startup Sauna, the leading open-source seed accelerator program in Europe. Having been running it two batches already and preparing for the third, and Summer of Startups once, he sure knows what is needed to get early stage ideas flying. In addition to seed accelerators and startups, Antti has a vast experience from B2C and B2B sales.

Mike Bradshaw, Hammerkit

Mike is community shepherd at HammerKit and a Startup Sauna coach. Also dis-organiser of BarCamp Helsinki and other un-conferences, helps startups with presentation skills, host at Hub Helsinki, co-driver with the Travelling Salesman and organiser of MobileDevCamp.fi for the last three years.

Taneli Tikka, CEO at Soprano Brain Alliance

A serial entrepreneur and a startup activist of sorts, know from several consumer Internet service projects such as IRC-Galleria, Dopplr, Muxlim, StarDoll, RunToShop, Vakuutuskone.com,and others.

Risto Rautakorpi, Gorilla Ventures

Risto is a co-founder of the seed investor Gorilla Ventures one of the Vigo accelerators. He has IT business experience of over twenty years. He has alternated between hands-on entrepreneurship and senior roles in global companies.

The teams will pitch according to the following schedule:

18:10 Design&Fund 18:20 Earth House Oy 18:30 RecThing 18:40 Eco Arecca Oy 18:50 Conatix 19:00 Kimmpis 19:10 weAll 19:20 LivLiv Solutions 19:30 Uniquer 19:40 RF SensIT

Come and check out some real pitching action. Same Pitch time, same pitch venue.

We are excited to give you a sneak preview of Aalto Ventures Program, a new minor program for all master students in Aalto University. AVP kicks off in September 2012 with a keynote series Changemakers, which brings experienced entrepreneurs and thought leaders to share their insights with aspiring entrepreneurs.

Aalto Ventures Program is all about inspiration, insights and experience. See what they mean for us in the AVP blog.

Ebootcamp gave me a serious indigestion problem. You know too many lessons can kill people. What a tremendous source of inspiration(I am not exaggerating!)  Anyway here are the three most crucial lessons that I hand-picked to share with you guys. I tried not to overlap with Lauri’s points.

with a kiva founder, Matt Flannery

1. Dualistic approach: be smart and optimistic

Vinod khosla was after all a master Yoda. Whatever he utters on the surface would not make sense, but if you think through, you can grasp what it truly implies. He gave out some good punchlines you are tempted to tweet out. Out of those, I’d say the following line was the best.

“You must explore all the possibilities that can put you to failure, but at the same time you have to have a religious belief that you will succeed.”

What he calls the nuanced approach(above) is essential. As Lauri said in the previous blog posting, there are countless ways that your startups will fail and nevertheless one still must have an unshakable belief for success. Yes this is a tricky balancing act. If you do not understand the subtlety, you probably won’t be able to survive over a long haul. If you have only the blind belief, however strong your commitment is, you won’t last too long. In the flip-side of the coin, if you obsess with the risks of failure, you won’t last too long either.

2. Be picky about who you’re getting fundings from

When it comes to getting a VC funding, it is easy to believe that the point of funding is a money injection that will keep startups alive and push them forward for success. Well it’s not quite right. What numerous VCs and angel investors at the event kept telling us was that start-ups have to be super cautious about whom they are getting fundings from. If they can choose, it’s awesomely better.

What VCs can offer to start-ups is not only money to invest, but also their expertise and networks. The latter part would not count merely as a support or some marginal factor. It can determine whether your start-up will be able to hit the mark or not. Just like dating, study their portfolios and ask smart questions to people who had a investment from them. Just like marriage, if the relationship will turn sour sooner or later, it’s better off not starting the relationship from the beginning.

3. Sell

Someone said, any business can be categorized into two things essentially: Make and Sell. While those two pillars of business cannot be too important, I think selling part is often ignored or at least less attentively taken cared of. Vinod Khosla said- Yes I had a crush on him- “sell, sell, and sell”.

Startup people should pitch their ideas anywhere anytime. Except for some rare cases, it is not a good idea not to pitch your idea or ask for sign-up for NDA, being afraid of getting copied. And for startups at more developed stages, one should still sell like crazy. Whether it’s a mid-aged guy living next door or a incredibly successful figure, like Bill Gates, one should never stop selling.

To be frank with you guys, I had many moments where I was hesitating to strike up a chat with people, worried about why he or she would want to talk with me. And that was the most stupidiest idea of all. Until I saw this guy from Greece, I couldn’t really bring myself to approach big guys. Yes I was squandering golden opportunities to pitch Aaltoes and my stories to them. The guy always asked and pitched his idea, whether it was Vinod Khosla, or Greg Papadopolous, former CTO of Sunmicrosystems. He didn’t just seem to care about his relative positions compared to them.

His just-ask-and-ask spirit pushed me forward and at some point, I surprised myself, pitching to people in a calm and confident manner, not the best but still okay. Anyway, yeah let us sell.

A window of opportunity is open for you

Lastly for those who wish to know how the event was put to an end. I’d like to share with you 5 start-ups that were picked by judges in the pitching competition. And you can see a very familiar name on the list

They went so far as to even get a chance to showcase their wonderful ideas on Demo Conference. You can get a glimpse of what it would have been like through youtube video clips. Well then, Nähdään!

-DH-

This week I was participating in the BASES E-Bootcamp at Stanford with Juho, DH, Kristo and Claudio and it was a blast. Here are couple of random points and lessons learned. Unfortunately due to time constraints, it isn’t very organized, so apologies for that. However, as we yet again learned, the most important thing is to have something out for the customers to see

1. Speaker rounds

At least I really enjoyed the four speaker rounds we had during the weekend. Basically the concept was, that the participants were divided into groups of ten and then had smaller sessions with seasoned entrepreneurs and VCs. This way the discussion was very informal, fun and I hope everyone got more out of these.

2. Why and how startups die?

As part of the Speaker rounds, Ricky Yean, founder of Crowdbooster (YC Summer 2010) had an interesting point on why and how startups die, based on his batch of YC startups. For none of the companies not operating anymore, it was a question of running out of money, but more about the chemistry between the founding team and their passion for the idea. If you just can’t stand the face of your co-founders or don’t care about the product anymore, it’s really hard to keep going with the ups and downs of the startup-rollercoaster.

None of the “failed” companies actually had to go bankrupt or just shut down the company, but due to high demand for engineering talent in the Valley, all of them got aqcu-hired and the team re-positioned into the acquiring company. Of course there might be a lot YC-bias in this one, but still: not bad, right?

The importance of team and passion for the vision was also heavily emphasised by the other speakers throughout the whole weekend. I guess in addition to increasing chances for success, it’s also good to know that having a killer team will make the failure more profitable.

3. Biz Dev -workshop

On a practical side, perhaps one of the most interesting items was the business development -workshop on Day 1. The topic was “Business Plans gone wrong” – something you might not expect to be covered in an inspirational conference. During the session, the instructor walked us through a couple of cases, where companies were facing serious financial problems and how those were handled.

In such situation, one should ask three questions: what can I do without, what I don’t need at all and how could I increase margins. Another advice was to cut costs only once and after that, forget the dead and focus on the living. Cutting personel many times can be really stressful and start a vicious cycle, so it’s better to get it right for the first time. Also, after letting people go, instead of worrying about them, you should make sure the remaining ones are happy and motivated.

4. Max Levchin

The last but definitely not the least keynote was by Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of PayPal. The speech was great, but I found two points particularly interesting. First, you should remember that most all valuable things are also hard to make, but not everything hard is valuable. Thus, when you come up with an idea that seems valuable, first check that it’s also hard, but after that, triple check that it’s also actually valuable. Second was a simple question for evaluating potential investors: what will it be like with them, when I at some point need more money?

5. Networking

This one is a classic, but I’ll still repeat it here. Even though there was also a lot of substance in the keynotes and workshops, the most valuable part of the bootcamp was meeting and getting to know all the other participants.

Cheers, Lauri

I and DH had the honor to lead the startup tours organized for the international E-Bootcampers. So both Wednesday and Thursday the basic rhythm of waking up before 6am and going to bed around 2am went on.

Tesla Roadsters

Even though having been several times to the Bay Area, it (once again) definitely had something new to offer. Tesla, making electric cars without compromising any design or convenience related issues, let us in to see their production line. They’re constantly looking for interns, so Lauri & Mikko stay tuned for a Startup Life intro! Photographing inside the premises was absolutely forbidden, even though sometimes the rules are made to be broken.

A tiny swimming pool at Google Campus

Google was pretty crazy. Instead of getting thrown out for “just using the free wifi”™ we got inside! The 30.000-employee company has indeed a pretty nice HQ. The engineers have literally built their own working spaces and we saw desks varying from a jungle to an inflatable tent. And the food.. We knew how much people hype on Google’s gastronomic offerings to its employees but seriously – the food scene in the campus is more than impressive. The cantina we ate in had everything from Japanese to Mexican cuisine and from the best pizza ever to delicious indian chicken.

Yahoo‘s data center was another stunning place. A huge room filled with noise, hot air cut with cool air breezes and a respectful amount of server racks consuming a ridiculous amount of electricity makes you think a bunch of things – e.g. which of these hard drives do contain my flickr photos. To access any room a four-fingerprint-scanning is required. The co-founder of Yahoo, David Filo, was in the house, showing us his servers wearing an old cosy looking stanford sweater. Roger that.

Intel was a bit of an anti-climax of the day since instead of seeing the actual company we visited the Intel Museum. A bit of Heureka-liked tour into the early years of Intel and the development process of the processors revealed us still some curious nice-to-know info.

After Palo Alto it was time to go downtown San Francisco. Kiva provided interesting insights on social entrepreneurship as a non-profit startup. Kiva offers anyone the  possibility to give micro loans to people from developing countries eager to start to build their own idea. It’s actually a more fair and respectful deal compared to charity.

Our lovely 1/2 group of internationals!

At Twitter we had a nice session with six employees specialized in localization. Most of the discussion focused on the integration of the service into different cultures as well as on how the company has grown during its six-year existence. Twitter is definitely one of the biggest players revolutionizing the way societies communicate within as well as between each other.

Dropbox was the cherry on top. An exclusive tour at their brand new office right next to the AT&T Park with a sea view, a 400-employee-capacity and a music room (with a really decent band equipment and a grand piano) was simply great. Even though the office was nice, the most important thing at Dropbox was the laid-back open culture. While we had lunch, one of the head engineers just sat down with us to chat, Drew Houston (the CEO) drove by on a little electric scooter and  all the time someone was playing ping pong. Still you could be sure that everyone was professional in their own field and shared the same passion (to make Dropbox the greatest service on Earth). Chris Barton, the founder of Shazam, was also present and had a short Q&A with us. Dropbox HR people definitely approved Startup Life and what could be a better giveaway than 5GB of free dropbox space? ; )

Other startups visited during the tours were: Foursquare, RockHealth (accelerator), Zynga, AirBnB, EA and Palantir.

Claudio likes Intel. A lot.

The two-day startup touring ended up with the actual E-Bootcamp kick-off dinner where Douglas M. Leone, partner of Sequoia Capital, gave an insightful keynote (and a Q&A) about thinking differently, the first approach to a specific market and the entrepreneur’s four risks: market, people, product and money – underlining the market as the most crucial factor. Douglas now knows about Startup Sauna and is more than willing to see the best teams from the spring batch in the Valley!

So far it’s been great to help BASES people out with the arrangements and we’re really looking forward to the rest of the days!

100+ great individuals with the right mindset to create new things in the same place. Simply Wow.

- Juho & DH

A few weeks ago two Aaltoes guys, Juho and DH, got a mission: to join E-bootcamp and help out the organizers of the event as a partner. Although it was such a creepy idea to go back to bootcamp once again – we’ve already served 3 years in total in military – we quickly sensed that it’s going to be so much fun, just by the fact that we would be able to meet 100+ entrepreneurs coming from all over the world at Stanford university campus.

While DH and Lauri, another participant of the event representing Tuubio, flew in San Francisco, Juho was already enjoying a beer with Startup Life interns (Nelli, Otto, Pekka) in a cool bar called Zeitgeist.  The interns told us that they are truly content with their jobs and are learning a lot while working with get-things-done entrepreneurs. Just like what Nelli did last year, Otto extended his stay in the Valley as he wanted to work there longer.

The next morning after some serious playing with waffle machines we headed to I/O ventures located at downtown San Francisco to work. The place was packed already in the early morning. Kristo and Tuomo from Metrify joined us for lunch – their speed is pretty impressive as they had had 12 meetings yesterday.

True entrepreneurs always take risks, don't they?

In Palo Alto we finally got to meet Zissis, a handsome guy from Greece and one of the organizers of the E-Bootcamp. We were assigned to lead the startup tours taking place during the next two following days which was great – we’re going to see some of the most stellar companies in the world and herd a group of aspiring entrepreneurs. We also started to envy Stanford students just a bit, mostly for their meal plans. The student dining room provided incredible amount of food options as well as an ice-cream machine (!).

E-Bootcamp is a bootcamp after all so no place was actually secured for us to sleep in. Nevertheless we, the restless warriors, did not flinch at all, because we knew that life is always full of surprises. Fortunately E-Bootcamp crew (us included) quickly found two very kind Stanford students who stepped forward to host us. Somehow it felt like things turned out better this way as now we’ll be able to get some sense of how it truly feels to be part of the Stanford community. Tomorrow we will walk 20+ people through the coolest companies of all – more on that later.

Alright! Seems like we need to get some sleep for a change. Stay tuned!

- DH & Juho

Full house, as always!

This time Pitch it. revolved around three key areas; travel, learning / education and healthcare and was themed strongly around very early stage teams. Around 100 people arrived to Aalto Venture Garage to hear nine teams pitch their ideas in front of the experienced jury.

We heard pitches from:

• Citizen – A social marketplace with small business networks as customers.
• GTP Group – Very energetic girls working on a tool for backpackers!
• Going to school – an app for gathering data on school children’s moods.
• GoExplore – Changing the travel search game.
• Gift.it - Easy, fun, impulsive way to chip in for gifts to relatives colleagues etc.
• GraduApp – a motivational tool for near-dropouts.
• vTranslate – a video translation/dubbing service.
• Mexican Food in Helsinki – Cesar pitching for REAL mexican food for Helsinki!
• Lind – dust filtering masks optimised for arabic countries and arid climates.

After some deliberation, the jury agreed on three winners:

GoExplore is a solution for people travelling on a budget. Essentially they answer the question where can I go if I have 500€, rather than the traditional From X to X search. Their niche-driven approach was appreciated by the jury. A good place to start.

Lind won as the jury saw great potential in the product if well executed. Sandstorms and dust are a big health issue in arid desert climates where it rarely rains. Most filter masks aren’t optimised for this and Lind seeks to implement a scientifically valid solution.

GraduApp is a motivational tool for students who struggle with their work. A combination of reminders, motivational elements and time management is how GraduApp works on the issue. Their clean presentation received cudos from the jury.

What was really great about tonights Pitch it was that there was a great sense of community among the crowd. Everyone was cheering each other on and the athmosphere was a wonderful mix of competition, camaraderie and a genuine interest and passion for startups. Heck yeah! We got a great thing going here people, let’s keep it up! So happy to see the importance of grassroots activities.

Let’s wrap this up by reminding everyone to APPLY FOR SUMMER OF STARTUPS! You’ve got til Saturday the 31st at 23:59 to apply. To the bunch of awesome teams at todays event who are applying, good luck to all of you!

Thanks everyone for participating and an extra special thank you to our jury of Mike, Riku and Oskari!

This is a guest post by Hanna Toivonen & Kiki Ylimutka, both Summer of Startups alumni from last year. The original post can be read here.

Steve Blank & Hanna after a TV interview

Summer of Startups, the Y-Combinator -like Start-up accelerator program of Finland, selected us and 10 other teams from 74 Finnish and international teams. For 10 weeks our idea and us were kicked, crunched and polished by the most successful enterpreneurs and industry people. We learned the basics of pitching, business model development and the enterpeneurial lifestyle. It was a tough school as we had no idea what to expect. We knew basicly nothing about start-up life before attending the programme. We jumped into the water and learned how to swim. But oh man did we learn!

The team changed twice and heaven knows how many times we pivoted. To have a childish mind really helps. Without prejudice and the ability to not know it all and cope with chaos and uncertainty makes learning a lot more fun.

Lessons we learned from Summer of Startups:

1) Team: Get the best and driven people. Not friends, not ok people, the best in what they do. And see the value of their talent for the idea. No one needs a no-function person to hang around. Learn the motives behind every person to work for the idea. Skepticism kills creativity. It’s good to have a well balanced team of practical people and idealists but world has never been changed by people that don’t believe that it can be changed.

Steve Blank’s Startup Personal Checklist:

• Are you comfortable with Chaos & Uncertainty?
• Are you Curious, Resilient, Agile, Passionate, Driven, Articulate & Tenacious?

2) Take nothing for granted. Things that you can’t predict do happen. People you trust reveal not to be trustworthy, you could end up in hospital for six weeks, you could end up having to fire your best friend, people tell you what to do and what not to do, people expect things that you can’t perform, people can start suspecting you’re all shit and don’t believe in you. This all happened to us. You can’t be perfect, but you can trust your:

3) Intuition. The most important thing you possess. The first gut feeling you have about people (before they open their mouth), things and decisions is usually right.

4) Dream. Dreaming is where all things can be changed. Then build a vision, grow it, and enjoy the ride.

5) Fail. You will fail. Many times. All dreams can’t come true, but that’s the way you’ll find your way. Hitting the wall, Learning from failures and trying something different. Like a kid learning to walk.

6) People don’t see what you see, and they don’t believe before they see it. So if you don’t believe like a crazy person and make it real somehow, no one will. The dots along the way will follow.

7) Passion. Einstein didn’t do what he did just because he liked numbers. Passion is needed for creating something for the right reasons, to be able to believe and try again after failures, you’ll need tons of it. Passion is the key element for all the energy, enthusiasm, creativity, problem solving and love behind your product and people.

7) Right motives. Good things will happen when you have good intentions. Money, greed, power and gaining glory are never the right motives of doing anything good. Stripped of your titles and materia, you are never better than anyone else. And you shouldn’t try to be. Try to be the best you instead.

8 ) Focus. . .!!!

9) Believe in yourself. If you don’t, why should anyone else.

10) Success is the best revenge. There are always people that don’t believe in you, there are always assholes along the way. Surround yourself with people that believe in you and do what you can do best.

All in all Summer of Startups was a great school. 10 weeks of intensive brain athletics. Now we’re on our own, still learning how to swim but better prepared for the sharks.

More about Summer of Startups on change makers and aaltoes.com

Back to the marketing plan now. “Stay hungry, Stay Foolish.” -Steve Jobs

- Hanna & Kiki, The Crazy Birds

This is a guest post by Alexey Solomatin (August 6, 2011), a Summer of Startups alumni from last year.

You can read the original post here in English and here in Russian.

Your idea isn’t that unique and there are competitors.

No matter how genius you are, it isn’t exactly true. Even the most innovative idea, had been attempted to be realized or is being realized at one point or another. I would say it is not worth to be worried about, it is quite normal. Most important part is not about coming up with the business idea, but actually to wisely make it happen. Realization of the business is hard and troublesome. In the beginning it seems that it is awesome business idea and everything is easy, but believes me, it is absolutely not like that. You always stumble, problems start happening, which seem like impossible to solve.

Business always solves logic paradox- “problem of chicken and egg”.

Just yesterday I was talking to the founder of the web page trulia.com, company that is widely popular in US and now is getting into IPO. In our discussion Sami touched very important issue “egg and chicken problem”. In Russian this paradox sounds more like “problem of hen and egg”. Which one came first: egg or hen? While solving the paradox we see that in order to get the hen, we need an egg, and to get the egg we need a hen. Question-what to do? Such questions need to be solved, and most often, they need to be solved very quickly.

As you guessed, there is no sole solution to this problem. I shall mention that, a lot of new entrepreneurs most often face this problem of “egg or chicken”. They don’t know how to proceed further and are afraid of actually moving forward.

Companies stop their existence because their founders stop fighting for the company. They just give up. But there is nothing impossible: “water sharpens stone” (Russian proverb)

Success by facing the difficulties depends on your ability to think fast, be judgmental and creative. Within last several years, press writes a lot about so-called “overnight success companies”, meaning, such companies that earned millions and billions of cash in very short period of time. Such articles are very traumatizing for the vision of young entrepreneurs. It gives such impression, as if it can take very short timer to earn billions of dollars. I believe that it is possible, but for that one needs to have crazy, extremely busy schedule and be very lucky. Chances that your company will be in the list of ‘overnight success stories’ are very small.

For the most of the companies it takes years to develop their concept and get profit out of it, at it IS NORMAL!

Always try to reach for the stars, the more higher you go, the more chances for the success you will have.

In English there is similar expression. In translation it means: if you try to reach to starts, and then you fall, there are big chances to land on the Moon. Take into consideration that this phrase doesn’t go against previously mentioned ‘overnight success’ companies.

You should always do everything on the level of 5+, especially on the early stage. ALWAYS! No one likes unprofessional people.

Begin by searching for your competitors and analyzing their enterprise.

There are a lot of smart and active people with great ideas among big amount of my friends and acquaintances. I noticed one thing that is common in most of them, which is-they don’t know how to use Google.

It might sound silly, but Google actually helps a lot in finding out information about competitors from open sources.  By befitting from this information, one can create profile of the competitors doing the same work and understand what exactly they do in their organization?   What does their business model and success consist of? How do they earn profit and what is their strategy of further development?

Before starting anything one needs to know all of that information very well.

Be judgmental towards your business. That will help you to have fresh look at it.

By analyzing found information about your competitors, it is possible to create vision and model of the market that might need you and your product. It helps you to understand which benefit you are bringing to your potential customers. At this particular stage there is nothing to be worried about, in case if you will find out that there is nothing special that you can offer to the market.

It is important not be upset; you should try to find new corners, different areas where your product haven’t been promoted yet or can be competitor for existing solutions. It is also possible that you can change your concept and start developing completely different product after doing an analysis.

Once again, it is very important to be judgmental towards your business and look at things from critic point of view. Blind love and hope won’t bring too much of a benefit. Everything needs to be in balance.

As a conclusion.
All what has been mentioned above is my person opinion. I am happy to read your comments.  Please write me back if my post was interesting for you. Original text: Alexey Solomatin, http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/startup/125295/ Translated from Russian: Zaira Mammadova { Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship }

Aaltoes Pitch it., on March 29, is a great opportunity to get feedback, find funding for your startup and get it on the map. The open mic session is perfect for getting initial feedback for ideas.

Check out our jury:

Oskari Lehtonen, Koppi | Catch

Oskari is a partner at Koppi | Catch, one of the Vigo accelerators. He is a serial entrepreneur and has conducted research in Stanford University, Silicon Valley and Singapore among other places. Oskari is mainly interested in consumer related applications and services and media sector.

Riku Seppälä, Open Ocean Capital

Riku joined Open Ocean from the big data startup Hopper Travel in Montreal. Prior to Hopper, Riku co-founded two startups, Canvious and NHybrid and helped startups at Montreal-based accelerator Bolidea.

Ramine Darabiha, Rovio

Ramine is a French entrepreneur, gamer and blogger. He is the founder and CEO of MySites.com, expert in cloud computing. His past experience is in large scale gaming communities, and recently mentored the Summer of Startups and Garage48 programs. He is also a coach at Startup Sauna. Currently manages R&D at Rovio.

Antti Ylimutka, Startup Sauna

Antti is wingman at Startup Sauna, the leading open-source seed accelerator program in Europe. Having been running it two batches already and preparing for the third, and Summer of Startups once, he sure knows what is needed to get early stage ideas flying. In addition to seed accelerators and startups, Antti has a vast experience from B2C and B2B sales.

Mike Bradshaw, Hammerkit

Mike is community shepherd at HammerKit and a Startup Sauna coach. Also dis-organiser of BarCamp Helsinki and other un-conferences, helps startups with presentation skills, host at Hub Helsinki, co-driver with the Travelling Salesman and organiser of MobileDevCamp.fi for the last three years.

Melting snow, +5 degrees, sunny mornings and lots, lots of fresh ideas. It has been exactly one year since I applied to the Summer of Startups program, and it will be difficult to explain, in words, how much my life has changed ever since. Have you ever been on a trampoline, right over the sea, and stayed there for eternal minutes thinking whether you should jump or not? Well, Summer of Startups is exactly the kick in the butt you need to jump in the sea of entrepreneurship.

AntsLab – One of the winners of Summer of Startups 2011

I still remember myself working in the Spring on university projects and studying hard for the exams when, suddenly one day, Maksim and I were walking to the Aalto Venture Garage and discussing how to help people to enjoy a better life using their mobile phone. The next morning, we were working on our first startup, AntsLab. The summer of 2011 was a very special summer, since it changed my life in so many ways. After having graduated from the Summer of Startups, I found myself more capable, ready to confront my decisions, ready to change the world. It would be impossible to list all the things I gained from the Summer of Startups, but here I list the top 5 things that definitely changed my life:

1. Love your team.

Most people think you should have a prototype, customers, etc. before applying to the Summer of Startups. All crap. You need the best team ever, you will build the rest during the 10 weeks.

2. Learn and do. But mostly do.

Learning is important, but doing is more important. Have always one person in the workshops and the rest working on the prototype, don’t waste your time having all team members at every presentation.

3. Aim high.

If you aim for the Moon, the parabolic shot will make you land on Earth. But if you aim for the Sun, be sure you’ll land, at least, on the Moon. Remember that Finland is not your market, nor it is Europe. If you want to change the world, the first step is for you to admit that there is a world out there to be changed.

4. Pitch.

If there is something you will be doing during those 10 weeks, that is pitching. We pitched over 100 times in less than two months. Use every person, every dog and every mirror you find to pitch your idea. And if, for any reason, that person, dog or mirror doesn’t understand your business, then improve your pitch. Make it simpler, make it shorter.

5. Have fun, and enjoy.

This should be placed as number 1. Do exactly what your heart tells you, nobody forces you to create your own company. And if you ever feel you are not enjoying, then quit immediately and go do whatever makes you feel good. Being an entrepreneur is exactly doing what you want, and taking the responsibility for your own actions, so don’t waste time doing something you don’t want to do.

“Summer of Startups is a 10-week program where you come with a team and build a prototype for the demo day.” – most people say when they describe the Summer of Startups. My say is, Summer of Startups is a step towards a new lifestyle, a new way of doing things where you are the one in control of your decisions, the first step towards being called an entrepreneur.

But it is not just 10 weeks. It is the two months before the 10 weeks, when you build your team. It is the 10 weeks, when you crystallize your idea, draft a business model, build a prototype and start your customer development. It is the next six months talking to customers and Vcs, testing your prototype. But foremost, it is a lifetime of building awesomeness with your own decisions, with your own team, with your own company.

It’s been a week since we landed back in Finland from our visit to the wild wild US. We want to wrap up some of the major points from our time across the ocean. This post is by Tomas and Lauri, the newest Aaltoes members. It’s a lengthy read, but full of substance,  so grab a cup of something and sit down, you’ve got the time.

The journey can be split into two parts. First it was the West Coast for us, with San Francisco, Palo Alto and Stanford. Then later we headed down south (and eastward) to Austin, Texas for the massive SXSW Interactive. Let’s take care of the Bay Area days first, and get to our time in Texas in the next post.

Thank you San Francisco!

When going to the United States, be ready for paperwork, administrative tasks and hassles of various kinds. First thing we had some trouble with, was the rental car at the airport. We had filled out some forms in a way which was at odds with the rental company’s logic and were nearly denied the car we had fully paid (and by “fully paid” they mean you will need to pay at least some $90 more). With a few smiles and a few more pleading words, we did get to drive into town in our fine American made car. Next paperwork we were presented was a fine slapped onto the windscreen of said car – a fine for having our wheels in the wrong position when parked. Lessons learned…

Still, it would be dishonest for us to bring up any more negative points regarding our time in the States – it was all fantastic. We got a lot done, met a lot of great people, made great new connections, heard numerous good talks and overall had a lot to bring back home.

i/o Ventures

One thing that we took care of on the first day was to go talk to Paul Bragiel of i/o Ventures in San Francisco. As a serial entrepreneur and a travelling lecturer on the topic Paul was a must hook up for us here and we had planned the meeting in advance. The good man took time from his busy day to talk to us and we cooked up interesting possibilities for future collaboration. Also learned useful things about how he is running things with i/o – the place looks great and popular. Definitely a place to visit when in San Francisco.

At this point it is good to point out something about communication and planning. First of all, have all of your communication abilities available. Get a local mobile data deal – they are affordable enough and are crucial in keeping you and others updated. Twitter is bigger in the US than in Finland or Europe and actually used for communication – so use it. Furthermore, the data plan will most likely make your navigation easier. Don’t get lost, that would be silly.

Also plan your logistics while you are at it; random roaming (no pun intended) around can be nice, but you most likely are not on a vacation and efficiency is what we want (trust us, the days will be long). We had three to four things laid out for each day, and transportation will take time, so count that in.

Downtime in the morning while waiting for our car to arrive.

We kept checking Tweets, sites like meetup.com, and emails for random and relevant events like the Seedcamp party. Leave time for these kind of happenings when setting up your daily schedule, don’t make it too tight and rigid. Once the day was through (and turned into the night) we’d get ourselves back to the hostel to write up a blog post of the day for an hour or so.

The Nordic Game event was the first time Tomas got to pitch the products and Aaltoes concept to a professional, though tipsy audience. Lessons learned! It was obvious that in a crowd of Angry Birds and other veteran level developers and entrepreneurs you can’t out wise these people, but then again, why would you need to. One of the most important lessons learned was that you don’t have to – just be yourself.

Diving in with the knowledge you have about your organization and the passion you have towards it, you’ll soon find yourself chatting, debating and waving your hands just like the rest of them. Having a good message to deliver and a good ear with which to listen, one doesn’t need to show off or use any means of trickery, just deliver and do it with passion.

The Stanford Campus was sunny and welcoming.

We also had some arrangements down in Palo Alto (known as Espoo by the Finns living here) and Stanford University. It was great to visit the University and the Campus – the place is glorious. We sat down at Stanford Technology Ventures Program offices and had a good talk with Forrest Glick. We focused on about eCorner, which is their video portal and archive and we have something similar in the works for Aaltoes. Lauri is planning on taking the project further and was glad for the comprehensive session here.

eCorner process layout at the STVP offices. Thank you Forrest!

A lot of manual work goes into setting up and maintaining such a content service and the process needs to be well organized if you want a stable and successful service. And we do! Forrest gave Lauri some wonderful insight from having done this for numerous years. Some of the things stressed in addition to the structured process of it all, was the importance of audio quality – this needs to be top notch. Relating to this great audio perhaps is the success and popularity eCorner manages with their podcast, which they churn out only hours after each recording. Podcasts are not as popular in Finland, but it is something that can really add value to a service of this kind no matter the location. Lauri now has great ideas of how to make such a service even better and more fitting for Aaltoes’s needs.

Again, Forrest took time from his schedule to help us out – people here are busy, so make sure you plan things in advance and ask people what times suit them. One of the main content of eCorner is the ETL-seminar series (Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders) and our meeting was just before one of these. We sat in with the rest of the Stanford crowd and it was indeed an interesting talk given by two generations of Entrepreneurs, Sandra Kurtzig and Andy Kurtzig, a mother and a son.

It was interesting to hear about Sandra’s journey in revolutionizing the manufacturing software industry. The whole story of woman creating a company out of scratch and not accepting any venture capital along the way brought some new insight at least on how to do things differently. It was interesting to find out how her software got named; she first thought of aptly naming the product used for manufacturing management, MAMA. Though having the clever link to the female founder, the male driven industry couldn’t cope with it. Thus the third letters were added and everyone was more than happy with the result: MANMAN!

We also had some Finnish people to meet – these were some of the Startup Life interns working in the Bay Area. We had a casual dinner in Palo Alto and shot interviews with three interns in the cozy surroundings of the restaurant. These materials will be used in the promotion of the next round of Startup Life, you can check these out later.

The interns are happy!  Anne Liiri is interning as a part of the marketing team at Apptivo,  Raimo Tuisku is a developer and interning at UserVoice and  Jussi Valtonen is working over at Eucalyptus.  They shared great experiences both work related and otherwise during the dinner and with the video camera. One thing was obvious – the working places, companies, people and positions can be very different indeed and there is something for everyone, as long as you are ready to work hard enough and bring something of value to the startups. Check on these, and you are in for a rewarding experience.

Overall looking back at our time in Silicon Valley, not much would be done differently – it was a success. OK, a fine here and little mix-up there, but those kind of things are natural enough. Regarding the city: the facade of San Francisco is a cultural patchwork and it is difficult to pin down what the city is all about. On the surface it’s hard to find your way, but thanks to clear organizing beforehand we got more out of those  four days than we would’ve expected. For San Francisco we were prepared, Riku, Atte and Lauri had been there before. But what came next was something utterly different and we came to realize that South By Southwest was no ordinary tech conference…not at all.

SXSW is big, busy and full of business.

Last Friday sixty eager Crawlers visited six sweet startup offices around the city center of Helsinki.

Startup Crawl was a perfect after-work event: all startups were well-prepared and enthusiastic to welcome the groups of Crawlers. We saw cool presentations, innovative refreshments and really neat offices. … The evening’s high point was the after party at Helmi, where we had a few drinks, some snacks and great discussions about startup entrepreneurship.

Overall, it was awesome to see entrepreneurs and startup-minded people from various backgrounds getting together and having a great time. Chatting with startup founders, playing minigolf inside offices, Enjoying Tiki Bars and etc. Definitely not something you do every day – that’s for sure!

Big thanks to all Crawlers and and get ready for the next Crawl!

And once more, we want to thank all startups that made the awesome evening possible! Cheers, Meetin.gs, ThingLink, drawElements, LeadDesk, Blaast and ExperQ!

PS. We hope you did not have too bad hangovers!

So the last three days of SXSWi are now behind us. These days went by much as the other days spent over in Austin, TX: rapidly and filled with exciting and useful content and encounters. There was of course still the opportunity to make some new connections – and we did!

The trade show opened up on Monday and Aaltoes had a presence here at the Finnmob stand. Other Finnish players were present at the same spot, such as: Delicode, Mukava Music, Kassi and Kiosked. Much of these the days were spent in Trade Show hall talking to people, explaining how we do things here in Finland. “Oh really, 500 mobile startups from a small nordic country of five-million people? Wow!”

At the Trade Show, there was a great mix of large established companies and fledgling startups. All of them with a lot to show and tell. It was great to walk around, talk to people and not only what they are offering, but how they approach you and how they sell themselves.  Again, interest in regards to the startup scene in Finland and what we offer was sparked in many such exchanges.

We also had a chance to visit some excellent panels at the Startup Village. One of them was titled “Startup Ecosystem That Never Sleeps” and was presented by four entrepreneurs from New York city. They described why New York has such a great startup ecosystem and why they have no doubt that it will become the absolute startup capital of the world. They did place much importance on the fact that New York is such a booming business and media center and it would naturally follow to become one for startups as well. However, there was much to be said for the dynamic entrepreneurial setting that is provided by the social side of the city and the many talented players therein. For example one of the panelists, David Kidder of Clickable.com, hosts a monthly startup breakfast, where many projects have begun and later prospered. After the panel the Aaltoes team talked with these key players and got yet some more wonderful connections in our network.

We have just landed in Finland. Now taking care of the jetlag and putting all things learned together. Look forward to our full report on our USA visit.

ps. See you at the Startup Crawl tonight.

(And remember all of it in the next morning)

We started from the realization that in most of the Finnish networking events, a big part of the attendees just end up talking with small groups of people they already know. One of the best cures for this has traditionally been free alcohol, but that approach has its own problems. Especially if you want to give a good impression for future business partners, employers or employees and remember all of them in the next morning.

Some history

The idea of Startup Speed Dating started to take form in the latest Get Involved with Aaltoes -event. The four of us met for a first time, with a few common factors: all of us wanted to have a more active role in Aaltoes, meet awesome people and give something back to the community in the process. And most importantly, we all happened to sit in the third row when the first batch of workshop groups was divided. We started prototyping with the more traditional networking methods, and eventually started to think how we could do networking differently, to actually be able to talk with all the people in the other groups as well. The idea of the first Aaltoes Startup Speed Dating was born.

Aaltoes Startup Speed Dating

So find your business cards, think about your awesome pitching strategy for two minute dates and prepare to meet a lot of new, interesting people! Or then just come, we can help you with the rest. If you need, we can provide you with a pen, some paper and a printout of the current weather forecast. Then you have at least something to talk about with the rest of the people after you have already found a perfect team to form a startup with, somebody to hire for the newly formed company and somebody to hire you if you need a backup plan. And a few new friends with whom to hang out and enjoy food & drinks in the after-networking.

So, two more days of SXSW has passed. Much has been learned, much has been seen and much more we will take with us when we finally head back home to Finland.

“Anything to declare?” “Yeah. Go to SXSW!”

The first day the four of us mostly stuck mostly together, going to the same panels/talks and talking to the same people – this was in attempt to create a shared “flow” together.   It worked. We got a lot out of the Lean Startup sessions. Eric Ries was present as well and offered some brilliant insight. It was very useful to hear directly from different start up teams, what aspects of the Lean Startup method worked for them and how the put the in to practice. One thing that would have been great to hear about, would have been some criticism of the method. Something could have been brought up that would have given feedback that could have been implemented into developing the Lean Startup thinking – that is what the idea is itself about. Indeed Eric Ries mention this himself, and promised to have some for next year. Leaner and meaner! Let’s get agile.

One “section” of the SXSWi conference is indeed entirely startup themed – The Startup Village – this has been a wonderful opportunity for us. After the initial plan of sticking together, we split up more in an effort to see more of what is one offer. Trust us, there is more than you could ever hope take in, even with a group of four. Still the Startup Village has been our main focus.

And of course the mingling has been great too. Decks of business cards have been traded and many great connections have been built. Social skills are a vital asset in an event like, and people are open all day – at the convention and later in the parties. We have honed our explanations of what we do and what we can offer into sharp and sure pitches. Not only have we been able to strike up interest among the plethora of interesting people, but we have also received great feedback. People who have been involved in similar environments

Really, we have made some very concrete connections here and have been able to get people excited about the noise Finland is making among the startup scene. We have a good thing going. Invitations have been sent, and people want to see Finland.

We will report more soon…

This friday after-work will be relaxed networking combined with exclusive insight at real startup offices.

The concept is similar to a regular pub crawl, or appro, but instead of queuing to crowded bars, you’ll get warmly welcomed to innovative business sites. Instead of paying an enormous amount of money for drinks, you’ll get a fine after-work event and useful information. Instead of waking up with a considerable hangover, you’ll might even wake up with a job in a real startup.

Meh, sounds like a concept well worth bringing to Finland.

Startup Crawl is Finland’s first startup-to-startup sprint, where participants visit local startup offices. The crawl will provide students and other startup-minded people to get a view into Helsinki startup offices and mingle with others in the Helsinki startup community. Cool, huh?

Benchmarked from USA, this event offers finally an opportunity for students to get a tangible understanding of the mystical startup word.

In brief:

What:              Startup Crawl

Where:           Helsinki. Afterparty @ Helmi from 9pm till late. http://g.co/maps/5dxtu

Tickets:           http://aaltoesstartupcrawl.eventbrite.com/ (9 remaining!) or  buy your ticket at TKK, HSE or TAIK. Check out the ticket sales schedule at

http://www.facebook.com/events/399576410056497/

Confirmed startups:

ThingLink, a provider of image interaction tools, changes how people interact with photos by transforming them into a navigational surface for search, commerce, and social connection. Innovative use of social media is a great possibility for all businesses!

drawElements is a computer graphics engineering company developing solutions for benchmarking and analyzing the quality of GPUs.

Having a systematic way of making outbound telephone calls can be a great business driver. LeadDesk provides tools for these activities. These tools can be used as a complete call center solution or as a partial solution with any existing CRM.

Blaast brings mobile apps to the next billion people. By using the revolutionary approach of running mobile apps in the cloud, and not on the device, Blaast brings rich, always-on apps to feature phones.Blaast brings mobile apps to the next billion people. By using the revolutionary approach of running mobile apps in the cloud, and not on the device, Blaast brings rich, always-on apps to feature phones.

And yes, we know what you’re thinking: snacks and refreshments will be served along the way!

See you there!

Build It, the hackathon that started on Friday evening concluded on Sunday evening with an open-to-public demo session. The gathering was a chance for the teams to share their prototypes, pivots and lessons learned from the weekend.

Community services trending at Build It

Out of the 16 teams pitching in the final demo session, quite a few focused on delivering various community-binding and neighborhood-connecting services – do we smell a boom?

Judges to the competition were Minister Krista Kiuru, Mike Bradshaw of HammerKit, Jyrki Koskinen of IBM, and Nur Ketene of Eficode, as well as our Teemu to give some student hacker perspective.

The rules of the rookie pitchers: 3 minutes’ presentation with an emphasis on showing what the team did during the weekend – we <3 prototypes! Appreciative of approach of actively talking to customers and fast deployment, the judges awarded Kimppis and Korja.us as the grand winners of the weekend.

The full team list of pitches is as follows:

Sea Energy Tag Korja.usPetit a* Canvast Kimppis FEST. Startup Sauna video platform Aalto-Dibs ztribe jobit LetsConverse Puuguru I know where new life Webtiles

For a more detailed description of teams, head here.

On the right track

Says Krista Kiuru, Minister of Transport and Communication: “The atmosphere at Build It has been wonderful, it’s a whole new concept of a supportive ecosystem. The projects clearly had commercial applicability. I especially appreciate how hands-on the attitude of these people have. Like in Build It, it’s time to roll up sleeves, and get to work. Similar to our KIDE project, we want to see Finland become a leading nation of digital services – a yet-to-be-uncharted terrain.”

Once more, a shout out to Build It sponsors, Ministry of Transport and Communications, IBM and Eficode.

The weekend’s been a lot of fun for the organizers, and hopefully for the participants as well. Thanks all! xoxo

The Build It weekend hackathon has been a lot of fun and brought in dozens of cool people to Garage. Here’s a collection of moments and interactions in a format friendly to modern day humans, in tweets and pics.

• Friday Afternoon: Calm before the storm and excitement in the air.

No sleep tonight! Doors soon open, see you all here! RT @antonrissanen Catching a nap before tonight @ #aaltoes #buildit

— Aaltoes (@aaltoes) March 9, 2012

• Donghun is looking forward to the weekend… little does he know that 48 hours later, he’ll still be at Garage having slept only a few silly hours.

aaltoes buildit, at a launchpad, all set ready. This is gonna be super AWESOME. Mahtava Taaivallista #aaltoes #aesbuildit

— Donghunlee (@passioninglee) March 9, 2012

• We are in good company!

It’s the weekend of hackathons in Europe! Awesome development! Have fun at @aaltoes #buildit, @HackFwd #build09 and @railsgirls Tallinn! — Kristo Ovaska (@KristoOvaska) March 10, 2012

What’s more fun than coding? Eating and meeting people, exchanging ideas and getting inspired. Sounds cliché? Yes, but oh-so-delicious! Team spirit! Canvast show crew cohesion and sports matching headgear.A protip from Canvast to the world: Do-it-yourself static post-its are easy to make with a two-sided magnetic tape. I am in love and will pay a visit to Claes Ohlson first thing tomorrow morning.

•  Saturday morning and Korja.us are still going strong.

Our team members have slept zero hours and MVP is almost ready! #aaltoes#buildit#korjaustwitter.com/ktiihonen/stat… — Kalle Tiihonen (@ktiihonen) March 10, 2012

• Even Garage regulars want to voice opinions! Sjoerd from Asema giving his two cents.. Sjoerd, next time, don’t bicker, participate.

Can someone at #buildit with customer dev experience explain the Aalto-dibs-guys why they should consider a woman on the team #aaltoes — Sjoerd Handgraaf (@sjoerdhandgraaf) March 11, 2012

• Making contact with the outside world, Kimppis is brave to venture outside the Garage to conduct some Saturday night user testing.

Yo, nightclubbers of #Helsinki! Watch out for #aaltoes Kimppis tag team on a taxi stand near you & alpha test! kimppis.dy.fi/kimppis/

— Aaltoes (@aaltoes) March 10, 2012

Jobit team on Saturday night. Frontend developer Cathy is overjoyed: “It works!” Builders’ wave. Based on Saturday evening experiences, Build It needs a sequel, Dance It!

Thanks to all participants, organizers, caterers, and sponsors!